A New People’s League

June 27, 2016

If it weren’t already apparent, our country already has a crisis of political legitimacy. That point was hammered home thoroughly last week, when Clinton was not so much voted the Democratic presidential nominee as crowned by the media. As the keenly-insightful Thomas Frank put it, “Clinton won by an act of professional practice.” A fitting end, indeed, to a months-long display of pseudo-democratic bungling which had been meant to confirm what had already been decided behind closed doors, and which was subjected to a (politically-speaking) last-minute act of political insurgency from the outside in the form of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, which can now be not-so-safely ignored (but ignored all the same) by the party faithful. So what are we left with?

We are now facing a singularly bleak prospect in our national presidential campaign. Both nominees from both major parties now represent: the continued dominance of baby-boomernarcissism in our public life; the triumph of scriptednarrative over substantive issues; the tired clichés of ‘60’s sexual radicalism (whether of the Hugh Hefner or of the Gloria Steinem variety); the continued hostility to organizedlabor; the unimpeded privatization of public goods; the predominance of militaryinterventionism in our foreign policy; and the continued deep influence of big biz in our nation’sagriculture and energysectors. Despite Donald Trump affecting something of a popular style which stands likely to win him the election, it is becoming ever clearer that his “populism” is not the real McCoy. For all the supporters of one candidate love to fear and loathe the other, it seems clear now that no matter which one of the two major party candidates wins this election, business-as-usual will continue inside the Beltway. Once again, those of us who are concerned about the militaristic-neoliberal drift of our national politics will have to turn to a third-party insurgency that combines elements of the economic “left” and the cultural “right,” as we have done often enough in the past.

But what will such a third-party movement look like? As the historians of these movements, such as Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert Morlan, make clear: in the past, these third parties—the National Independent (later Greenback Labor) Party, the People’s Party, the Nonpartisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party—drew upon an acute awareness of structural deprival among specific constituencies, notably farmers and urban workers. This awareness had been built up through their experiences in cooperative and collective-bargaining movements—unions, credit unions, wholesale stores. In America now, though, organized labor has been broken, seemingly beyond repair. Many people who were industrial laborers are now either out-of-work or doing part-time make-work to stay afloat. Farmers have either gone big or gotten out, often to disastrous effect. What we have now in the United States is a vaguely-proletarianized labor force, consisting of temps, retail, transportation, service-industry and office workers and low-rung professionals. What we all have in common appears to be a state of economic anxiousness about long-term (or even short-term) prospects, combined with skyrocketing rates of consumer debt.

One trick that any new third-party movement will have to pull off, if it is to address both the rural rancor currently running the Trump train and the youthful yearnings of the baccalaureate Bernie backers, is to get this large, diffuse underclass of debtors to identify with each other, in ways that bridge the cultural gulf between town and country. The Farmers’ Alliance, which grew into the People’s Party, drew on a broad swathe of shared economic concerns, and it deliberately ignored the regional sectionalism and partisanship which was the primary driver of politics in the wake of the Civil War. If we want to forge a new Debtors’ Alliance or People’s League or Solidarity Party, we will have a similarly Herculean task ahead of us. If we want to set up collective bargaining institutions that represent the labor force in meaningful ways—whether credit cooperatives or guilds of part-time or contract-based workers in the service or transportation sectors—those institutions will have to deliberately draw on mixed bases of urban and rural members. This will be necessary in order to cut through the miasma that has separated us into members of largely-symbolic cultural cliques. It should hardly need saying that, being equally vulnerable to personal, consumer and property-based debt, out-of-work miners in Appalachia and English-major baristas in the Acela Corridor do themselves no good screaming at each other. (I say this not because I believe that cultural values are unimportant, or because I don’t believe one side gets more right than the other. But the culture is hardly well-served as it is by setting two increasingly-meaningless sets of identity-totems against each other in pitched battles as the whole field around us burns.)

This may seem an insurmountable obstacle. But it can be done. And I think it should be done. We are looking at an election wherein two highly-distasteful, widely-disliked candidates have been nominated by the major parties. The sixth party system looks to be busted wide open. In its place, there ought to be a movement that speaks to the real concerns of the American electorate, rather than to those of big corporations. Regardless of party, most people in this country, I should think, don’t want to be shackled to payday lenders and collection agencies from here to Kingdom Come. They don’t want to worry about choosing whether to eat or pay the medical bill. They don’t want to worry about whether they’ll even have a job, or a roof over their heads, three months from now. Most people would prefer not to depend on government or corporate largesse for their own livelihoods, but would rather have a fairer distribution of property.

Matthew Franklin Cooper
Matthew Cooper of Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a data analyst and institutional researcher with a background in middle-school English education and development economics. He has particular interests in appropriate technologies, heterodox and third-way cooperative theories. Sometimes he writes under the pseudonym Tom Peaceworth.

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4 Comments

One thing that will have to be done, in addition to what is noted, is to get any infant third party, such as the Solidarity Party, to act like a political party.

I’m posing over a year after the election, and I could well be wrong, but it just doesn’t seem that a party such as we’d like here is being formed as to the extent there’s a movement for one, it acts like a college club rather than a political party. Politics is a dirty business and political parties have to make practical alliances and make practical deals. A party like the ASP, for example, which has distributist leanings would be better off trying to co-opt, borrow, beg or steal disaffected Republicans and getting them to run rather than to wait for candidates to rise through its ranks, which will take decades to produce a result, if ever.

The Democrats this past election nearly saw their party co-opted by a “Socialist” (who is really a Social Democrat) and the GOP did see their party stolen by a former Democrat. There are a lot of races around the country where both parties put up two distasteful candidates (consider the recent race in Alabama). There’s always some respected member of the other parties around who could run but are edged out. Third parties, idealistic as they are, don’t ever seem to think of approaching them and getting them to run, genuinely or not, under their flag. They should.

In another Distributist article, there was a suggestion of creating a guild for small business owners. Most small businesses (75%) are one person establishments or nonemployer businesses and I suspect consist of many “contract-based” workers. If a true guild were established, this could wield enough political clout to address issues you described above.

However, I disagree with your comment: “I believe that cultural values are unimportant”. In fact, to establish a guild, it is precisely common values that will make it a reality. Many nonemployer businesses are established because of the owners frustration within Corporate America – lack of job security and upward mobility, outsourcing to foreign countries, frustration with the lack of accountability of management and immoral executive compensation. In gist, they have made career changes precisely because they value self-reliance, responsibility and justice.

My concern is whether there are enough small businesses that will abide with concepts like just price, guarantee of workmanship and the common good. If they did, this would almost assuredly give these guilds a competitive advantage over many large corporations and foreign outsourcing firms.

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